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June 5, 2019 - March 9, 2020
This serves to remind us, though, of how much is lost when letter writing falls in disfavor, as it has now, as a primary means of communication. We are so much richer and wiser because Rustin wrote letters and they survived him.
One element in the letters is Rustin’s eagerness to engage in self-examination and self-criticism, both of what he considered personal faults and of his political strategies.
“There are four ways in which one can deal with an injustice,” Rustin wrote. “a. One can accept it without protest. b. One can seek to avoid it. c. One can resist the injustice nonviolently. d. One can resist by violence.”
Exactly because he was not a prominent leader in any of the traditional venues for civil rights work—the black church, the NAACP, and Congress—Rustin was (and remains) often overlooked in civil rights stories and histories. In spite of these limitations, the historical fact is that Bayard Rustin was one of the most influential civil and human rights advocates in US history.
The social teachings of Jesus are: (1) respect for personality; (2) service the “summum bonum”; (3) overcoming evil with good; and (4) the brotherhood of man. Those principles as I see it are violated by participation in war”—it
And throughout his life, when individuals, colleges, prisons, and even so-called liberal organizations condemned or disciplined him for expressing his gay sexuality, he steadfastly resisted their prudish piety. Rustin was not straight—not even close—and he would not contort and distort his gay sexuality to please uptight heterosexuals.
Rustin’s resistance through the years was so deep and wide exactly because it recognized the interconnectedness of the multitude of injustices plaguing the downtrodden.
As Patrick Malin said at the General Conference, the primary social function of a religious society is to “speak the truth to power.”
believe this is the time to say louder and more frequently than before the truth that war is wrong, stupid, wasteful, and impeding future progress and any possibilities of a just and durable peace. .
On a speaking tour in California several months later, Rustin emphasized that nonviolent direct action was not just an effective strategy; it was also a dictate of Christian conscience. An extant outline of a workshop he conducted during this period—“Five Kinds of Nonviolent Direct Action Jesus Used”—depicts Jesus of Nazareth as practicing civil disobedience (“He deliberately violated the Sabbath laws”), noncooperation (“He refused to answer ‘quisling’ Herod when questioned by him”), mass marches (“Jesus’ entrance into Jerusalem with a large procession of his followers [including many from
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That which separates man from his brother is evil and must be resisted.
a variety of methods in which ends and means are consistent.
When one works to relieve racial tension (an area in which progress is slow, in which a life’s work can be destroyed by one hasty or unfortunate incident, in which the principle of ends and means must be observed faithfully) one must develop along with patience and a real consideration for the conditioning and point of view of others an easy sense of humor.
So you have a mental image of certain people as conspirators, bureaucrats, etc. Toward the individuals on whose faces you plant these masks you can be haughty or arrogant. You can completely forget the complexities of their task, the opposition which they may have to encounter.
I now believe economic and political freedom revolve around social equality.
3. Can a proper adjustment be made thru the incurrence of debt as one’s initial act on securing freedom?
Already they have begun to do to Gandhi what has been done to Jesus—worship him as an unobtainable ideal. That is the sin of men of goodwill—not really to believe in their own power.
To me the real question is: If not now, when do men of concern act with their whole body? In this way we say to the American public and to the world: When do you begin to draw a line?
I have never felt more keenly. A. J., I am sure that if we let Washington do this to America and the world without total resistance, we will do our cause great harm. Let us resist with our whole beings!
but democracy cannot be preserved by atomic war.
It is worth remembering that the United States, with 5% of the world’s population, controls at least 50% of the world’s wealth. Economic equality—not redevelopment of new methods of destruction—will do away with the threat of aggression.
Rustin also makes another nuanced point that King would stress time and again—that nonviolent activists do not cause violence but bring to the surface the violence that has long been simmering underneath.
The pacifist is opposed to using violence, but he must be prepared to accept it as a part of social change, knowing that social change is often impossible without it.
It grows out of the great housing problem which we have in all of our large cities and which is perhaps at its worst in Chicago.
Dang. Still a huge problem today...
Perhaps one of the reasons that you felt that you could not think of questions to ask springs from the fact that very often at your age, and it was certainly true for me, the questions were about so many things and came so rapidly into my mind that in one sense the whole world and all experience was a question.
It is very easy for us to make in a calm intellectual atmosphere a judgment as to how we would behave, only to discover in time of emotional crisis that we have not enough strength to carry through.
Marriage is an individual matter. I have no right to advocate that any one marry anyone else, and I have no right to forbid by my action anyone’s marrying a person of his choice. And thus I am unalterably opposed to laws in many states . . . forbidding intermarriage.
I wonder if he was applying this to same sex marriage as well? In his own mind, if nowhere else.
and many highly respected white men have the same fault that is now casting its deep shadows over Bayard’s life.
Remember that almost everyone here is “trying to be a real Christian” and the church is the most militant institution.
Rustin would later recount that King was not a firm devotee of nonviolence at the beginning of the boycott.
How complicated things become in the heat of a struggle—searching for nonviolent answers in a society that accepts so many assumptions of violence presents problems indeed.
The April 1956 edition of Liberation included an article that Rustin ghostwrote for Martin Luther King, Jr. The article, which told the story of the Montgomery boycott, marked the first of King’s many publications.
Wow. I had no idea this was an aspect of their work together.
The fight of the Negro for integration and equality is a vital component in the fight of the common man, Negro and white, to realize higher education, and culture, and a deeper commitment to moral and ethical principles.
While there is still much legal work to be done, there is ample and convincing evidence that the center of gravity has shifted from the courts to community action. It is on the community level that court decisions must be implemented. The job before us now is to demonstrate that our cause is basic to the welfare of the community; and we must challenge our white fellow citizens—to win them to believe in and to practice democracy. Law will be very important in this process, but something new must be added. . . . We must recognize in this new period that direct action is our most potent political
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A part of this is the realization that men are truly brothers, that the Negro cannot be free so long as there are poor and underprivileged white people. 3. This leads to the realization that economic and social change for the uplift of all poor people is part of the struggle of Negroes for justice.
the problem could not be solved on a party basis. As an indication of his recognition of the need to correct this error, at the Prayer Pilgrimage he vigorously declared independence of both parties.
Most important below, however, is the explanation of King’s refusal to refer to Rustin even once in his book on the Montgomery bus boycott—Stride Toward Freedom. Rustin had played an essential role in Montgomery, and he and Levison had even helped to draft large sections of the book’s manuscript. But Rustin’s name was absent in the final draft.
Secondly, in regard to King’s book and my name being left out—this was my decision and a very sound one, I believe. I do not know if you know that the reactionaries in the South have distributed several pieces of literature accusing King of being a Communist and linking me, “a Communist agitator,” with him. I did not feel that he should bear this kind of burden.
I mention this only because I would not want you to think that Martin is the kind of person who would take my name out because of fear. I want you to know that I insisted that he do so.
No trickery can be successful in separating us from our friends in the struggle to bring full democracy to our nation. So far as we are concerned, those things which would divide us can never become as great as those which bind us together.
First, we must march to demand an end to lynching. This will not restore Charles Mack Parker to life, but it could put into jail his murderers, who now freely walk the streets, conduct their usual affairs, and with tragic irony attend church services on Sunday. We will say there must never be another lynching in the U.S.
According to Horowitz, Rustin thought King had two reasons for letting him go. “One was that King did not know how to handle the public part of it, but the other was that there was tremendous pressure from ministers, some of whom were gay themselves, to get rid of Rustin. So King had this double pressure on him. It was a fairly homophobic church [that King was dealing with]. And there were Northern SCLC ministers who were gay and who were in the closet, and they didn’t like the discussion [about Rustin’s homosexuality] coming out.
The most effective way to any disarmament today, we believe, is for some nation to start scrapping its weapons. When one country disarms first, it opens the way for others to do the same. Some nation must find the courage to act first.
The world is full of hunger, disease, and abject poverty. We believe that the Soviet Union and the United States with other countries should pool their resources to remove such suffering—by using the money now wasted on weapons of destruction.
An economically disprivileged people is not able to utilize institutions and facilities geared to middle-class incomes in an inflated economy.
King even agreed to invite Rustin for an Atlanta meeting at which the tactician would lay out the case for the march to the SCLC staff.
I honestly am shook by how crucial Rustin was to the March on Washington and how very little I knew about him
“There was a discussion about whether Bayard Rustin should be the director of the march,” Lewis recalls. “And there was a caucus that took place between James Farmer, Dr. King, and me, because two of the so-called Big Six, Roy Wilkins and Whitney Young, thought that because of Rustin’s sexual orientation, members of the Senate, especially Southerners, would try to smear the march.” “We caucused,” Lewis says, referring to Farmer and King, “and we came to the conclusion that we wouldn’t get into a fight with Wilkins and Whitney Young. Instead, we would select A. Philip Randolph and let Mr.
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Randolph immediately named Bayard Rustin as his deputy. “Rustin,” Lewis says, “really became the director of the march.”
Character is a matter of judgment within the context of a whole life.
We are not in any way going to be influenced by corrupt efforts on the part of undemocratic elements to deprive our movement of so capable a leader.We are well aware that if we were to be alarmed by so specious an attack as that launched by Senator Strom Thurmond, our movement would prove itself incapable of the historic tasks that lie before it.
An interesting thought when you consider some of the moral purists of today
